Betsey Hun Schmidt, PhD
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Born in Washington, D.C., Betsey has lived in New York for most of her life and has taught and developed curriculum and assessment tools for every learning level, kindergarten through graduate school. She is CEO and Founder of Mesh Ed, a creative education design collective that builds and launches enrichment programs with schools and cultural institutions for middle school, high school, and early college students.
Betsey Hun Schmidt has worked in the progressive education reform space for nearly 30 years. Most recently, Betsey led R&D teams for Whittle School & Studios, a global network of independent schools, where she designed and built in-school, after-school, summer, and online programs that foster project-based learning aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. At Whittle Betsey led the Global Centers of Excellence initiative and served as Vice President of Studios.
Prior to Whittle, Betsey served as Chief Curriculum and Innovation Officer at Ascend Public Charter School in Brooklyn, NY, which serves some of the lowest-income neighborhoods in New York. As chief curriculum and innovation officer at Ascend, she helped the network scale from 3 schools to 10—educating over 4,000 students—and led the development of an inquiry-based, liberal arts K-12 curriculum that helped Ascend close the racial achievement gap in New York State. Betsey holds a PhD in American literature from New York University and a BA from Wesleyan University, where she served as a trustee from 2016-2019.
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